This Bernie news round up includes lots of links related to the Dem Debate and the media’s awful coverage of it. The endorsements of the top two Progressives in Congress got little to no coverage. They are covered here. Bernie Sanders’ seeming defense of Hillary Email coverage has been remiss in some details… Vice News does a good job of covering some issues, and I include that piece, immediately followed by Bernie Sanders’ post-debate interview with Chris Cuomo in which he clarifies his statement.

Bernie Sanders garnered one of the biggest applause lines during the debate Tuesday night — and a trending hashtag — when he slammed the media for focusing on Hillary Clinton’s “damn emails” instead of asking the candidates about poverty, inequality, trade policies, and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

But from watching television coverage of this dramatic moment in the debate, you would only hear half of the story. Playing clips from the debate, CNN and other networks focused almost exclusively on the political impact of Sanders expressing solidarity with Clinton about her damn emails — while editing out his comment about the failures of the media to talk about the biggest issues facing America.

If we had to decide the winner of last night’s Democratic debate with only the opinions of establishment media pundits, Hillary Clinton won by a landslide. But social media and online polls overwhelmingly chose Bernie Sanders as the winner. So which is true? Is Hillary the inevitable candidate the insider media has been telling us she is since day one, or is the corporate media pushing a pro-Hillary agenda on a pro-Bernie electorate?

The punditocracy is in full agreement that Hillary Clinton was the winner:

–NPR wrote, “Hillary Clinton, the candidate with the most to lose, may have come away having gained the most.”

-In a New York Times article with the highly-misleading headline, Who Won and Lost the Debate? The Web Has Its Say, The Times wrote, “Hillary Rodham Clinton was the clear victor, according to the opinion shapers in the political world (even conservative commentators),” citing the opinions of overpaid pundits rather than actual people on the internet.

–The Guardian added to the mix, stating,”If you need to pick a winner from Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton will do.”

A New York Times article (10/14/15) by Alan Rappeport about who won last night’s Democratic presidential debate reported today that “Hillary Rodham Clinton was the clear victor, according to the opinion shapers in the political world (even conservative commentators).”

The Times quoted National Journal columnist Ron Fournier (“Hillary Clinton won,” 10/13/15), Slate writer Fred Kaplan (“She crushed it,” 10/14/15),New Yorker staffer Ryan Lizza (“Hillary Clinton won because all of her opponents are terrible,” Twitter, 10/13/15), Red State blogger Leon Wolf (“Hillary was (astonishingly) much more likable and personable than everyone’s favorite crazy socialist uncle,” 10/13/15), pollster John Zogby (“Mrs. Clinton was just commanding tonight,” Forbes, 10/13/15) and conservative radio host Erick Erickson (“I’m still amazed the other four candidates made Hillary Clinton come off as the likable, reasonable, responsible Democrat,”Twitter, 10/13/15). If these so-called “opinion shapers in the political world” declare Hillary the winner, then Hillary must be the winner, according to theTimes.

What the Times and these pundits failed to mention is the fact that every online poll we could find asking web visitors who won the debate cast Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the winner—and not just by a small margins, but by rather enormous ones.

Anderson Cooper: Opposing Illegal CIA Wars Is Unelectable

A key reason that the US has so many wars is that big US media have a strong pro-war, pro-Empire bias. You rarely see big US media badgering a politician for supporting a war that turned out to be a catastrophe. But it’s commonplace for big US media to badger politicians for opposing wars, even catastrophic ones.

CNN journalist Anderson Cooper is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

Here’s Anderson Cooper, badgering Bernie Sanders at the first Democratic debate for opposing the CIA’s illegal war on Nicaragua in the 1980s:

The question is really about electability here, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. You — the — the Republican attack ad against you in a general election — it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not a capitalist. Doesn’t — doesn’t that ad write itself?

Millions of Americans “supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua” in the 1980s. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the US government-installed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, promising to address Nicaragua’s extreme poverty and the lack of basic government services like education and health care for the majority of the population. In 1982, Nicaragua was recognized by the World Health Organization as the third world country that had made the most progress in health care.

a rally in support of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Family Guy creator and comedian Seth MacFarlane kicked off the event with a joke at the expense of Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) and his stiff, surly performance at Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

“Alright,” said MacFarlane, “I’m going to be brief to make sure that Jim Webb has a chance to talk.”

Webb repeatedly complained during the debate in Las Vegas that he was not being given as much time to speak as the other candidates.

R.T. Rybak, the former mayor of Minneapolis and a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, on Thursday accused the party’s leader, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of making “flat-out not true” statements about another top party officer, questioned her political skills and said he had “serious questions” about her suitability for the job.

The broadside from Mr. Rybak, which came in an interview late Thursday afternoon, followed weeks of internal party dissension over the number and timing of the presidential debates it has scheduled, capped by an acrimonious public dispute over whether Ms. Wasserman Schultz had punitively barred a Democratic vice chairwoman, Tulsi Gabbard, from the first debate, held on Tuesday in Las Vegas.

The comments from Mr. Rybak, who was interested in replacing Ms. Wasserman Schultz in 2013 and who was the favored choice of some of President Obama’s aides, were notable in part because he is not known as a public complainer. But by the evening’s end, most of the other party officers issued statements strongly supporting Ms. Wasserman Schultz and calling for an end to the public rancor.

“We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed,” said campaign spokesperson Michael Briggs.

Instead, Briggs said, the $2,700 Shkreli donated — the maximum individual donation allowed under electoral guidelines — will be given to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington.

Shkreli, who was hit with widespread criticism last month after he raised the price for the medication Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill, told Stat that he backs some of Sanders’ other policy proposals, but made the donation because he wanted to meet with him privately and “explain” how pharmaceutical companies set their prices. He also said that he would ask the senator what prices he would consider fair.

According to the Dallas Morning News, State Rep. Jason Villalba said it was “ridiculous” to say he compared the Democratic party to the fascist dictator party responsible for the 20th century’s most well-known massacre of Jewish people.

“It’s perfectly accurate,” he told the News. “I was in no way making a comparison to the current Democratic Party and Nazis. If they want to read it that way, then that’s their prerogative. That’s not what the intent is.”

Bernie Sanders’ campaign raised nearly $2 million since the first 2016 Democratic debate

October 14, 2015 (via AP)

NORTH LAS VEGAS (AP) — Bernie Sanders’ campaign said it raised nearly $2 million from the first Democratic debate of the 2016 race, and social media metrics showed he was the most-searched candidate on Google and most-discussed on Facebook and Twitter.

Meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s backers celebrated the day after what some said was the best two hours of her campaign.

“We were over the moon,” said former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Clinton backer who’d traveled to Las Vegas to watch the first such confrontation between the 2016 Democratic nomination contenders.

The liberal Democrat is set to announce his support for the Senator’s presidential bid during a rally in Tucson on Friday, just before Sanders heads to the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas next week.

Grijalva is currently in his seventh term representing Arizona’s third district. He is co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which was co-founded by Sanders, and a long time member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Sanders would have to get another 100 or so congressional endorsements to catch up to Hillary Clinton.

Ellison is a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Sanders helped co-found as a member of the House of Representatives in 1991. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the caucus’ other co-chair, endorsed Sanders — the only senator to have ever joined the group — last week.

“Bernie is really generating a lot of enthusiasm for civic participation,” Ellison told The Huffington Post, which he pointed out is especially important after the historically low turnout during last year’s midterm elections.

“We are in need of a civic renaissance in America and Bernie is generating a lot of excitement and energy among young people, old people, all kinds of people, and I think that is really critical,” he added. “The manner in which he is moving his campaign forward is healthy for our democracy.”

Why You Actually Should Care About Hillary Clinton’s Damn Emails

On Tuesday night, at the first Democratic debate of the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders was asked about the secrecy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s emails. By way of an answer, he turned to Clinton and informed her—forcefully—that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”

According to moderator Anderson Cooper, Sanders was employing a rhetorical gambit used by politicians and comedians alike known as “playing to the room”—in other words, it was a good shortcut to a big applause. His campaign capitalized on the surge, and with almost suspicious timing, sent out a fundraising email referencing Sanders’ crowd-pleasing remark. Evidently, 44,000 people were FeelingTheBern, sending Sanders a total of $1.4 million by the end of the night.

Were the comments endearing? Obviously. But true? Not so much. At least according to one American, who happens to sit a few desks away from me, and who probably cares about Hillary Clinton’s emails more than maybe anyone else in the world. His name is Jason Leopold, and he’s the VICE News investigative reporter sometimes known as a “FOIA Terrorist.”

Sanders interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on why he defended Clinton on email:

https://youtu.be/eLkTh6U4prI

Last, but not least, Charles Blow’s op-ed, for a lot of readers who left comments, was the clearest indication of the columnist’s leanings with respect to the Democratic primary. The responses were blistering at times and many included links to reports of widespread media suppression of debate polls.